Between Radical & Confessional Theologies: Whitehead’s God

A God of Love is A God Who is

Transcendently Near

The Process Doctrine of Divine Immanence

by R.E. Slater

April 1, 2023

Divine Immanence = Spirit Presence

Bo Sanders was a contemporary with Tripp Fuller at the outset of Homebrewed Christianity. Both Bo and Tripp were just coming into their own as student theologians focusing on their respective ideas of Whitehead and Christianity. Here, Bo utilizes Austin Roberts thoughts on the distinctiveness of Whiteheadian Philosophic Theology as a radically helpful approach to re-orienting the doctrines of God back to people and the church back to loving ministries.

It is important to remind ourselves of Process Theology's early struggles with the classical theologies of the 19th and 20th century (modern) church which institute had uplifted it's teachings of the transcendence of the Divine to the indelicate and immediate loss of God's crucial immanence necessary to the church and humanity.

At which point process theologians in the 1950s began to reverse this script of God  by the church by placing the Divine as importantly, necessarily, and centrally, immanent in relational ontological communication of the Divine with creation and humanity as a subset of creation.

In Christian terms we would say that the Spirit of God was set free to do the Work of God savifically, redemptively, and at all times, lovingly. At this same moment revived denominational groups such as Pentacostalism, Charismatics, Catholics, and a few other protestant movements began re-centering their beliefs around the Spirit of God. Which is a curious coincidence but wholly indicative of the Spirit of God's moving across the many heart's of believers noticing the church's paucity on the teaching of God's immanence in the lives of it's people everywhere. 

Now neither the transcendent nor the immanent doctrinal groups would necessarily deny the other's position even today's evangelical preaching separates God from man frequently and often when preaching sin and judgement, holiness and the sacred divine. This would be an example of God's transcendence from humanity.

Whereas the doctrinal immanency group will preach the imperative of God's nearness and presence at all times in humanity's lives regardless of sin and evil. That is, the divine is incapable of living his creation to which God has bound himself by love. Love never leaves but stays - as it can - in humanity's lives seeking reclamation and fellowship.

However, it is "relevant" to notice how one group places God further away from humanity when emphasizing holiness, sin and evil, while the other group says "Not so!" That the Divine is first and foremost loving before all other attributes of the Godhead - which consequently and necessarily places God intrinsically into the panrelational and participatory conversation with creation and mankind.

What does Divine Immanency Mean?

It is in this direction which I have strongly leaned over these past many years teaching how the love of God brings the Divine lovingly near, if not importantly making divine salvation central to creation in all ways imagined... here are a few:

• That God is neither justice nor holy if God is not first loving.

• That a transcendent God is no good to his creation if he leaves it. In fact, it will fall apart completely and wholly without God's presence momentarily infilling creation's length and breadth and entirety.

• That a God who abandons his creation is an unloving God; betraying his promises to always abide; and to be centrally located within his creation.

• That on the basis of God's intrinsic immanence can salvation and redemption ever occur. A transcendent God cannot save, heal, bind up, or participate with his creation when leaving it to itself. It is a bald denial of why "by Love's desire" (and not by "Divine fiat") God created creation at all.

• And finally, that because of God's Love we are to love and minister to one another; neither oppressing, harming, or shackling God's creation, nor ourselves; nor our bodily and spiritual needs; nor the church and its congregations; nor civil society; by oppressive rites and rituals of religiosity substituting idolatrous self-righteous legalisms for the clear and extended Love of God.

What Does God's Presence Mean?

And although I have spoken these statements with many more declarations - and far more elegantly in the past than I do here - when speaking to the processual immanence of God; when placing Love over sacredness, holiness, and justice; I do wish to remember again the necessity to write, teach, and preach of the Love of God over the more current church views of judgment and wrath based upon it's transcendent (and not immanent) views of God.

Theologies which withhold God's love from us and creation replacing godly immanence with transcendent religious forms requiring church-sanctioned penance and conversion. Human deeds which I label as unnecessary and ungodly teachings of the church misspeaking it's ideas of what God's love means to us a living, serving, hurting, parishioners to the living Spirit of Christ.

Furthermore, a loving God does not command religious actions as substitute to his loving care and indwelling. That all such actions to require worthiness of his love are vain, self-serving acts of self-righteousness and prideful heart.

That the only reciprocation to God's love is to love ourselves and one another. Not by dwelling in guilt nor self-beatings. Nor harming others in congregational displays of unholy rites and memed profferings of scape-goating (I think of the historical acts of church cruelty and oppression to the public as well as to its congregants).

What God's love means to us is that all our works - whether religious or not - are unwanted, unhelpful, self-deceiving, and but raggish substitutes for receiving God's love wholly and completely.

Outcomes of Preaching a Lovingly Present God

The most religious thing a penitent might do is:

• To give God's love away kindly, tenderly, helpfully, and with large amounts of humility, forgiveness, grace and mercy.

• For many process theologians this means progressive activism embracing humanitarian outreach to the unwanted, despised, ill-regarded, hated, and such like.

• For other process practitioners it may also mean rebuilding fully democratized ecological societies which value people and faiths of all kinds cooperatively, equally, fairly, and in ecological reconstruction of a polluted and failing planet.

• This then is what it means to teach a theology of love based upon a God who is immanently near and unwilling to leave us. 

One Last Word on Divine Immancence

Certainly God is "Other" than creation and ourselves but God's "Otherness" consequently demands God's Immanence based upon God's deep loving desire to be a Father-Creator. Process Immanence then speaks to a Loving God in process with his creation.

"Love is what makes the world go 'round. What makes life purposefully meaningful. And is the Soul-energy of the very Divine." Love - not holiness, not justice, not acts of religious self-righteousness - is the definitive story of the God who is "Otherly Near" - Abidingly Near - Sacrificially Near - and Presently Near - at all times, hard or sad or cruel or full of pain and suffering.

God's Love is promised to creation at all times throughout its stories of survival in unloving, creaturely worlds having abandoned loving caretake of one another for other unloving energies set as idolatrous images to the One Who Loves.

Peace and Love,

R.E. Slater

April 1, 2023

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Between Radical & Confessional Theologies:

Whitehead’s God

article link

by Bo Sanders

March 14, 2014

[all bracketed comments are mine - re slater]

*side note: "Radical Theology" as written here is not strictly secular radical theology but a theology which differs from the classic church teachings on a

theological doctrine. In this case transcendence v immanence. - re slater

Guest-post by Austin Roberts:

He is a PhD student at Drew University, studying with the incomparable Catherine Keller. [listen to her podcast here]

You should 100% follow his blog and you might want to read his book on eco-theology Process pairing Jürgen Moltmann and John Cobb.

I.

As a process theologian, I often find myself in the position of needing to explain or even defend the God that Whitehead affirms. I have these conversations with fellow academics and intellectual types who just can’t see how some of us can still call ourselves theists after the ‘death of God,’ as well as fellow Christians who struggle to see how one could reconcile process panentheism with the God of the Bible.

While the former group tends to be extremely critical of any hint of transcendence (whether in reference to God or otherwise), the latter group gets uneasy with the process theologian’s special emphasis on God’s immanence.

• For the former, transcendence is more-or-less relativized – if not entirely eliminated – by immanence.

• For the latter, it is usually the other way around: God is infinitely transcendent and created everything out of nothing.

For those who care to go into this kind of discussion, the core theological question up for debate is this: how immanent and/or transcendent is Whitehead’s God?

II.

I’m certainly not going to try to answer this with any sense of finality. What I primarily want to do here is to point out the difficulty of this issue when we have, broadly speaking, two types of theologians reading Whitehead in different ways today:

• those who resonate with Radical Theology
• those who are committed to Confessional Theology.

This is exciting to me, even as it brings new challenges to process theology. I’m not claiming that there is a full-blown contradiction between these two approaches, and perhaps there’s a way to bring these two approaches closer together. Even so, they are starting out with different assumptions and concerns that certainly shape their contrasting readings of Whitehead’s theism.

At the risk of oversimplifiction, there’s a sense in which Radicals tend to read Whitehead primarily through a poststructuralist lens (Derrida, Deleuze, Butler) while Confessionals read him primarily through the lens of tradition and scripture.

This makes for a rather striking difference between the two.

• One could always follow the “Whitehead without God” approach (Bob Mesle, Donald Sherburne). [sic, Whitehead was a Victorian Christian who was developing processual theology at the same time as the newer quantum cosmologies were being birthed scientifically. Thus, one reads Whitehead as a process philosopher rather than as a process theologian. This latter task was later taken up by Dr. John Cobb, Jr. - re slater]

• One can also see Whitehead’s God as nothing more than a cosmic function – and therefore wholly “secularized” – that is necessary for a coherent process worldview but totally uninspiring for spirituality or religion (Steven Shaviro’s reading in his “Without Criteria”). [here, the process philosophy of Whitehead is utilized to develop a wholly secular line of processual thinking ala metaphysical cosmologies, ontologies, and rightfully ethically, as an overall teleology of process thought. The word secular then is applied correctly but in Whitehead does not necessarily deny an underlying processual theology. In Whitehead, process is a correctly observed to be a philosophic theology as opposed to Christian theologies built upon an eclectic panacea of  Platonic-Hellenistic-Aristotelian-Enlightenment philosophic foundations as the church has done these past 2000 years. - re slater]

Personally, I think there are serious problems with these interpretations (that’s for another post) and they remain minority reports within the process community.

IIIA.

Let’s consider two streams of process theology, what I’m calling the Radical and Confessional paths.

On the one side are those who read Whitehead’s God in ways that strongly emphasize immanence – a kind of Radical theology, perhaps, usually with the help of Deleuze’s poststructuralist philosophy of immanence. Few process thinkers go so far as to deny God’s transcendence entirely (although see Kristien Justaert’s process pantheism in “Theology after Deleuze”), but the concept as more commonly understood is very much relativized by a more immanent God. This is rapidly becoming an influential way of reading Whitehead (I can confirm this based on my experiences at both Drew (sic, Catherine Keller) and Claremont  (sic, John Cobb) [Universities] where most students of Whitehead tend to lean this way).

My former professor Roland Faber, signaling a stronger shift towards immanence with his Deleuzean reading of Whitehead, argues for “trans-pantheism” as opposed to the more standard reading of Whitehead’s panentheism. He digs deep into the Cusan paradox of God as “Not-Other” and places a stronger theological emphasis on Whitehead’s immanent creativity. He interprets the later Whitehead as seeming inclined “to replace any remaining connotations of God’s transcendence with a totally immanent divine creativity” (Process & Difference, 216). As with John Caputo’s radical theology, Faber will also say that God does not exist but insists as the interrupting event of the new.

For Faber’s radical process theology, God is always “In/difference”: the insistence on difference and relationality of all differences. For the Radical approach, questions of Christian doctrine (Christology, Trinity, Revelation) tend to be secondary (at best) to the political and ethical implications of theology. The thinking here is that an immanent theology is better equipped for this-worldly activism based on democratic practices, over against difference-denying oppressive forms of hierarchy that are rooted in transcendence.

IIIB.

On the other side are those who read Whitehead’s God in ways that try to maintain more traditional theological intuitions of transcendence. I see this as a kind of Confessional trajectory for Whiteheadians that has been much more common for Christian process theology over the last fifty years. Confessional process theologians are not necessarily Orthodox in their beliefs, but they tend to have a stronger concern than the Radical process theologians to maintain ties to the Christian tradition and to more thoroughly align their theology to the Bible.

John Cobb is an obvious example here, especially evident in his rather high Christology in which he intentionally remains close to the creedal confession that Jesus was “fully God and fully man.” By reading Whitehead’s God as a balance of immanence with transcendence, he can affirm that:

• God is the most powerful reality in existence;
• That our existence is radically contingent upon God as our Creator; and;
• That we depend upon God’s grace.

Attempting to do justice to key themes of the Bible and Christian piety, Cobb will claim that:

• Because God is always working for the good in the world and truly loves her creation;
• God can genuinely reveal him/herself in particular ways;
• Our prayers can be answered, people might even sometimes be healed through God’s action in the world, and that death ultimately does not have the last word.

Unlike Radical process theology, Confessional process theologians unequivocally affirm God’s existence as a real being (e.g., David Ray Griffin’s cumulative argument in his Re-enchantment Without Supernaturalism).

A neo-Whiteheadian approach, as in Joseph Bracken’s theology, pushes even closer to traditional commitments and asserts a stronger (“asymmetrical”) sense of transcendence than even Cobb.

Like Thomas Aquinas did with Aristotle, and Augustine did with neo-Platonism, Bracken will use Whitehead as a general philosophical framework for special revelation in scripture and tradition, allowing the latter more authoritative sources to revise the former when necessary. The doctrinal results for him are an orthodox view of the Trinity, creatio ex nihilo, and bodily resurrection.

IV.

Some of us might cringe at the Radical approach, others at a Confessional approach.

• To Confessionals, the Radical approach might sound even more esoteric and complicated than Whitehead himself and irrelevant for practical or spiritual life outside of the academy.

• To Radicals, the Confessional approach might sound outdated and naïve at best, or imperialistic and oppressive at worst.

• Or some of us might instead be able to see the two as constrasting rather than contradicting and perhaps look for a way to learn from both, even if we share the more basic assumptions of one or the other.

Conclusion

If the Radical approach is helping to keep Whitehead relevant to postmodern intellectuals, religious skeptics, and academics – perhaps even effecting a “Whiteheadian revolution” or a “return to Whitehead” in contemporary philosophy and science

– the Confessional approach tends to have much more traction for pastors and laypersons.

This distinction seems to me to exemplify the challenge of identifying the task of theology today:

• Is it important to do theology primarily for the sake of the life of the confessing church, or

• Can we (should we?) move on and do theology primarily because of its continuing politically subversive and ethical power for society?

This is not a question just for those of us in the process community, but rather for any theologian who finds herself in this predicament, between the Radical and the Confessional.