R.E. Slater Shorts
Let's Talk About
Process Theology vs Universalism
by R.E. Slater
My "Shorts" are given as one-offs on any given topic of the day which I may have come across in my daily readings. Hopefully they spark another way of thinking about a subject whether that subject is light-hearted or heavy and disturbing. - re slater
Concerning the process view on universalism I would describe it as quite a bit different though getting to the same conclusion as universalism arrives at re God's reconciliation of the world to God's Self.
But I'd rather approach the story of God's love from a processual gospel standpoint than from a westernized version of systematic theology.
In the process approach, God is love and will lovingly interact with all of creation in every way possible without circumventing creational agency or freewill.
As creation bears the "Imago Dei" of God it bears:
- all the ability to bless;
- to recreate thriving communities; and,
- to enrich generative acts of love across everything around itself.
But when not enacting with our divine/human creational-nature - which is not a sin nature but a processually loving nature then:
- mankind's consequential actions will not bless,
- nor create generative thriving,
- nor provide enrichment to those around it.
In Whiteheadian-based process theology, a loving God's embeddedness of God's divine Being into creation allows for pancessual evolutionary growth of love against the self - or self will - which inhabits nature's soul.
- This divinely-based soul is molded out of LOVE, not sin.
- It is described as a processual pan-en-theism (NOT the Eastern idea of pan-theism).
Quite obviously, this approach has removed the classic approach of traditional theism which leans into God's transcendence much harder than it does God's relational immanence to God's creation.
This is inconsistent with process theology which does not deny God's transcendent "Otherness" but must speak to God's incessant, necessary immanence across all westernized doctrines of abondoness, judgment, separation, and errant beliefs of Divine Holiness.
That is, process theology leans hard into the immanence of God without denying God's "Otherness." God is not more God because God is transcendent but verifies God AS God when constantly abiding with us in God's immanence. Which is why process theology must redescribed traditional theism in terms of God-with-us pan-en-theism.
Love than is the coin with two halves... It is why we all have agency and also the reason we yearn to enact beauty.... But it is also the curse which pains our souls when we cannot, or do not, enact love thus enflaming our souls by the sin and evil we do reflected in the broken mirror of Love's passionate side. (FYI. Of note, in process theology God cannot do evil. God is without sin and evil. God is love.)
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| Dante's Divine Comedy in B&W Woodcuts |
Similarly, the western doctrine of universalism describes hell as a present condition and not a present expectation of the Christian gospel.
Hell is popularly depicted in the Dantian description of the Catholic purgatory in the title, The Divine Comedy, which is an Italian narrative poem by author Dante Alighieri, begun c. 1308 and completed around 1321, shortly before the author's death. In it, the Divine Comedy revels to readers the horrors their souls would go through if they did not obey God's laws nor live righteously thus promoting Christian legalism and prideful holiness by its material. And it is here that Christianity has backfilled it's idea of a Protestant Christian hell.
And because of Calvinism - though other non-Reformed approaches are likewise as guilty (Wesleyanism, Lutheran, Methodism, Catholicism, Eastern and Russian Orthodoxy) - we blame the world condition upon a controlling God determined to enact His will upon all the earth.
Calvinism thus tells us that we receive for our sin and evil divine imprecations as spoken throughout the biblical narrative of living up to God's contractual / covenantal obligations or else suffer the consequences of our unfaithful sin and evil.
- Of course, this would be a gross misreading of the biblical covenants as the Abrahamic Covenant beautiful shows salvation as unconditionally laid upon God and not mankind. A God who willing bears the surety of God's Atoning -Forgiving-Redeeming-and Resurrecting Self acts when walking through the sacrificial halves laid out by Abram.
- Or the Landed-Form of the Old Covenant as promised by God to Israel when coming into the land of Canaan to inhabit its enculturated regions and live out the love of God in their own way with their neighbors.
- Or the Davidic Covenant God made with the children of Israel assuring the nation a blessed reign and peace when the godly lead their flocks lovingly towards truth and beauty.
- Or even dramatically, in the New Covenant's displayed on Calvary's Cross when God Incarnate (Jesus) became the Lamb of God in Jesus' ministry, slaughter/death, and resurrection, underlining God's "sacrificial selfless service" to all the world as depicted in Jesus' atoning resurrection and dramatic revelation of God's everlasting love contra the legalism and unloving laws placed by Jewish religion upon God's people (sic, a parallel religious bondage to that of Rome's civil bonage).
Hence, Westernised Christian "universalism" seeks to theologically delimit and re-circumscribe the borders of the Jewish faith which fell into Greek hands with its prophetic fears of the afterlife. Universalism argues that the Love of God wins (or Jesus wins for those who wish to be more sancrosanct or principled than us Christian commoners).
That in God's Love all will be reconciled in this life or the next.
Which prophetic testament is also true of process-based Christian theology. But unlike process theology, progressive Christian Universalism is trying to heal its systematic doctrines founded upon Platonic philosophies which are neither processual, pancessual, nor centered in theologies of love.
Process Christian theology is progressive but it's basis wells up from upon a non-Westernized, non-Platonic foundation. It's philosophic foundation is grounded in Whitehead's process philosophy which rejects all non-processual philosophies including the church's past two Millennias of dogmatic teachings.
For a process theologian, remaking a pig by putting lipstick on it won't be enough. The entire affair of Western dogma has to be uprooted and replaced upon Whitehead's process philosophy of organism in order to be able to live up to the God of Love whom we are worshipping as opposed to the church's creaky traditional platforms weeping with theological holes throughout its substructures because of their defiences.
In conclusion, universalism and process theology share the same end result but not the same philosophic foundation. One is inadequate and unsupportable. The other is superior and can get the Church to it's intended ideation of worship a God of Love without recoursing to the bible's older ideas of secular and religious hell.
R.E. Slater
September 12, 2023
Addenda
1 - I forgot to mention that process-based panentheism is inherently combinatory , or re-connective as a processual teleology embedded in God's love. Hence, process theology really doesn't have an eschatology but a teleology which assumes that Jesus in the processual reconnector to a "broken" creation burdened with an agency inclined towards blessing but plagued with unloving responses against it's very ontological structure. You may read more on my website.
2 - For the process few out there I would welcome further written observation beyond my mere attempts to describe the why's and wherefore's of a westernized religious system that is flawed and unable to work in a postmodern, post-Christian cultural context. Moreover, I find process theology to be more adept at morphing with the times ahead of us much as the church is trying to apply outdated Hellenised-Platonic thought to do the same from its the past 2000 years of institutionalised traditionalism.Thx.
3 - My typical (Calvinistic) Reformed soteriological chart in my non-process days focused on the Work & Sufficiency of Christ. Below may be more of a Wesleyan approach emphasizing the importance of a faith verified by it's works lest it simply exists as a useless, or meaningless, faith that "indwells" with "expelling" God's love in action.
