We’ve trained an artificial intelligence model called ChatGPT to interact in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests. ChatGPT is a sibling model to InstructGPT, which is trained to follow an instruction in a prompt and provide a detailed response. - Open AI
My first question to the Internest using OpenAI's CHATGPT:
#1 Explain how Whiteheadian Process Theology is relevant to the subject of Christology - R.E. Slater, January 28, 2023"Whiteheadian Process Theology is a philosophical theology that emphasizes the ongoing, dynamic nature of reality and the ongoing, creative activity of God in the world. In terms of Christology, Whiteheadian Process Theology emphasizes the ongoing, dynamic nature of the relationship between God and humanity, and the ongoing, creative activity of God in the world through the person and work of Jesus Christ. This understanding of Christology emphasizes the ongoing, transformative power of Christ's life and teachings, rather than seeing him as a static, historical figure. Additionally, Whiteheadian Process Theology emphasizes the idea that Christ is not only the revelation of God, but also the means by which God continues to reveal and transform the world." - The Internet, seconds after asking my question
#2 Explain how process theology is different from traditional theology - R.E. Slater, January 28, 2023Process theology is a theological perspective that emphasizes the ongoing evolution and change in the nature of God and the universe. It views God as a constantly changing and evolving being who is in a process of becoming, rather than as a fixed, unchanging entity. This is in contrast to traditional theology, which often portrays God as a fixed, unchanging being who is outside of the universe and not affected by it.
Process theology also emphasizes the importance of the universe's processes and the role of human beings and other entities in shaping the world and the divine.
It also emphasizes the idea that God is not all-knowing and all-powerful, but rather limited in his knowledge and power. - The Internet, seconds after asking my question
*My response to Statement 3 is why review of CHATGPT's statements is required. My revised statement here is that when speaking of God in process terms we speak to God's "self-limitation" by divine fiat not of God's inabilities. However, a truer reply is that my statement is false and that God's love allows for all kinds of responses from a freewill creation. That God created by love before God did by fiat - that God's fiat is always subservient to God's love.
As a freewill Being, God imputed God's Self into creation, and by this imputation came God's freewill love. Hence, God's Self- limitations are not limitations at all but how love works. It does not control. It does not demand. It does not direct.
Further, God's Love flows as an energizing force throughout creation and as an inner divine force, "just is". "Is" doesn't require any qualifications. "Is" is God and "Is" is us.
Love is as Love does... and Love does as Love is. - res
And remember, passion is the other half of Love's coin. By passion we can do evil things: individuals, nations, churches, communities, organizations, businesses. It is how a processual cosmos behaves in its ontological "becoming" - both its good it's and bad overtures to life's symphony.
R.E. Slater, January 28, 2023
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| Transforming Old Wineskins... |
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| to New Wineskins... |
My Theological Review of
OpenAI's CHATGPT Response
by R.E. Slater
January 28, 2023
Overall, its answers to my two questions were immediate, relevant, and to the point. However, I had asked it a trick question. The first to summarize a fathomless subject. And the second to trip it up. All-in-all I think we time and acuity this can become a very helpful research too. - res
LET'S EXAMINE MY FIRST QUESTION
I hope to utilize Artificial Intelligence more often in the future in my research and reports. When I do I will notate my use of OpenAI's CHATGPT as opposed to my own writings. In doing so I'm hoping to find the pith of relevance between process philosophy and theology with traditional Christianity which sits upon a plethora of non-process paradigms. Paradigms which require deep extraction and expansion.
The idea of God; of God's activities and agendas; of God's intimate participation with creation and our lives; of God's redeeming, loving, atoning actions; and of our many earthy responses to this God, has shown itself to be a complicated historical and present subjective-objective existential array of good-and-bad responses by man to one another and creation itself.
Process theology is based on how our organic world and socio-eco societies work. We see processual cycles and results reflected again and again in the bible though usually unobserved by the bible's own narratives and Western church theologies.
Process is how the world works. A process-based cosmology and metaphysics of ontology attempts to capture the profoundly-formative nature of God and creation into a resulting processual philosophy and theology made the more meaningful to the world we live in, and lying about us, when understanding its rhythms... and seeing its harmonies... as we learn to "go with the flow" of God and creation.
Overall, one might say Whitehead's process thought (originally called the "process of organism") is all about symbiance (cooperative unions) and holism (personal and communal intersections with self, others and nature). Or in the Chinese/Japanese ?Korean parlances of "balance and rhythm" as reflected by their cultures. But it also is far deeper than those simplified observations... which is why the branches of cosmological metaphyics and ontological theologies, among other derivatives, has arisen through the late 20th century and into today's metamodern era.
It provides promise to religious bodies and religious people that we can act more humanely to one another. More charitably and wisely. That the faiths we carry have relevancy in this world and to those around us when leaning into the love-and-peace paradigms of wholeness and being. Of Beings who are Becoming... more than they are... more as intended by God's Self in God's creational manifestations. When doing so we, as a freewill species, and within our internal being, may find deeper resonance with life, the universe, and God's purpose in this world.
SOME CENTRAL IDEAS OF PROCESS THOUGHT
- Process Thought is a very real reality with the deep promise to value all things as they are;
- It's difference as an applied philosophy is to regenerate and rejuvenate all things about us... itself a mirror image of how God and the cosmos themselves work and function;
- That each living community of communities is filled with loving potential and ability;
- That it recognizes value in difference;
- That it seeks to build peace into all relationships around us;
- And to know that what we see-and-feel by a life-generating metaphysic such as a process pholosophic-theology is speaking to the very vibe which moves God to be God;
- A vibe which tells us the becoming of God, and the cosmos, and ourselves, is a natural socio-eco-spirit evolution of life around us;
- That a processual cosmology is a deeply connected and intertwined panrelational, panexperiential, and panpsychic process between the parts and wholes of God's cosmic universe.
In other words, process theology is simply describing the Christ-event of the bible, but when doing so leaning into all processual forms of this cosmically salvific event rather than the traditional Christian forms which emphasis other observations out-of-sync with the nature and being of God and God's cosmos.
A process-metaphysic is no will-o'-the wisp series of Westernized Platonisms, Aristotelian-Scholastic thoughts, or Classic Enlightenment/Modernal philosophies whether European/Continental or American; all of which seem to argue for various forms of stoicism, legalism, isolationalism, or conformal doctrines of a militarised church socially, economically, politically, and ecologically.
And though Whitehead was seeking to recapture the processual propositions of past philosophers from earlier ages as far back as early religions and non-Hellenised Greek thinking, what his student John Cobb saw in it was a process theology for peace, goodness, and life-generating responses to all errant processes which are devolving forms of processual life changes.
Process theology then seeks to underline the goodness and love of a life-generating God fully involved in life-atoning-and-redeeming all becoming events towards beautify, wholeness, and solidarity back to itself. To essential "come back into tune" with creation's generative teleology.And though traditional Christianity says its "all these things" we plainly see that it has not been "all these things" to either man nor beast, stream or wood, communities of difference and communities of others. More rather, traditional Christianity has been and continues to become unholistic to the cosmos around us; harmfully deterministic in its exploitation and oppression to all things its comes in contact with; and deeply "unbiblical" in it's propositions of who God is and isn't in it's estimation. Which means like Christian's professed Savior, the church itself must repent and re-confess what it's all about by getting it's practices, attitudes, behaviors, creeds, and dogmas back in tune with the God they attest but do not know.
CONCLUSION
Lastly, process theology reflects Jesus' atonement as it's divine event is reflected back upon itself to the very "Life-giving" nature of our Loving God indwelling all hearts and world about us. God's atoning and redeeming work at Calvary is but part-and-parcel of life's creational beauty and essence. We see in it cute little puppies, babies, hobbies, and projects of unity all around us. The processual revolution of Jesus' Love speaks to the functional revolution going on about us though we see it not nor live it as we should.
The Cross then was a deep signifier by God of what life consists of around us. Divine-Life is the continual renewal and repurposing of the Spirit-life everywhere indwelling as it wrestles with creational freewill and indetermination which confronts a freewill creational every moment of it's existence. By it's very core a freewill creation must chose life and not death. That life will always be a challenge, filled with hardships and suffering against the very things which would devolve life from it's fuller potentials. Whitehead called them profound consequential results with ongoing potentials of life-releasing generative value. The church calls them the grace and peace of Spirit-filled Living when lived in God's Love. Process calls them one-and-the-same.
That divinity sovereignty is best described as God's giving of God's very Self into the very core processes of creation's DNA. That creation - such as humanity - is plagued with choices of good and evil, sin and love. And that it feels the deep drag and pull of creation's processually generative panpsychic Cosmic Being, it's processual organism, as weighing against all within itself which is out-of-sync.
The Christ event reflects as much. We are out-of-tune with God and with ourselves even as creation is fraught with the indeterminancy of it's freewill being. And yet, the Cross of Christ reminds us that God is intimately present with us and creation in actively transforming wayward fait-accomplis back to itself and to the very meaning of restitutional redemptive processes of the God of the cosmos. (*The meaning of FAIT ACCOMPLI is a thing accomplished and presumably irreversible.)
This then is how I would interpret OpenAI's CHATGPT opening answer to my first question. It's sentences were mundane and repeatitive but got to the general point of how we might intersect the old wineskins of Christian thought to the new wineskins of processual Christology when applied to contemporary thinking today.
A very simple request to speak to how process theology might reflect the very heart of the bible's Christ event deemed by the church as the world's mid-point of salvific history. That all which led before the Cross, and all which resulted after the Cross, - in the best of senses of loving becoming - was fully reflective, instrumental, even significantly recharging, of God's Selfhood in active redemptive participation towards God's insolent, and fully becoming partnerships with creation, with ourselves, and with all those apart from ourselves.
The holograms of our universe are but a microcasm of the stated organic whole we participate within physically, spiritually, emotionally, and theistically. God not only saves all... God is fully saving all each and every moment of every day forever and forever.
Peace,
R.E. Slater
January 28, 2022
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| It's time for Christianity to EVOLVE! |
