Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write from the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Sunday, April 13, 2025

A Comparison between de Chardin and Whitehead's Structural Frameworks, Part 4


A Comparison between de Chardin and
Whitehead's Structural Frameworks
PART 4

by R.E. Slater and ChatGPT

March 31, 2025

METAPHYSICS

Teilhard de Chardin:
  • Reality evolves upward, driven by an inner principle of convergence.
  • This principle is spiritual energy, which draws all things toward unity in God.
  • Evolution is meaningful and directional because it ends in Christic fulfillment.
Whitehead:
  • Reality is an organic process of becoming, not linear or convergent.
  • Each actual occasion includes the past (via prehension), novelty, and a subjective aim toward intensity or value.
  • The universe has a teleology of creativity, but not a fixed endpoint.

ONTOLOGY

Teilhard de Chardin:
  • Ontology is hierarchical and teleological—moving from matter to life to thought to spirit.
  • Emphasizes substance ontology evolving toward higher complexity and consciousness.
  • The “within” of things (interiority or consciousness) deepens as complexity increases.
  • Everything is converging toward a final unity: the Omega Point, which is both a metaphysical destiny and identified with the Cosmic Christ.
Metaphysical Goal - All evolution culminates in spiritual unification in Christ—history moves toward one ultimate center.

Whitehead:
  • Ontology is based on actual occasions or drops of experience—not substances, but processes.
  • The cosmos is a pluriverse of events related through prehension (experience), not a single convergent destiny.
  • Reality is relational, internally complex, and indeterminately unfolding.
  • God is not the terminus of evolution but the lure toward creative transformation.
Metaphysical Goal - To describe the becoming of reality through internal relations, novelty, and creativity—without requiring convergence.


THEOLOGY AND COSMOLOGY

Teilhard de Chardin:
  • Deeply rooted in Christian eschatology.
  • God = Omega Point, pulling creation forward.
  • The noosphere (realm of thought/consciousness) emerges as a higher level over the biosphere.
  • Christ is cosmic: the meaning and culmination of the universe.
Whitehead:
  • God has two natures: primordial (envisioning all potentiality) and consequent (feeling and responding to the actual world).
  • God is not beyond time, but in time—interacting with the world through persuasive love.
  • No predetermined “end” or Omega Point—creativity itself is the ultimate metaphysical principle.


INTERPRETIVE COMMENTARY

While Teilhard believes in convergence, unity, and a preordained cosmic goal his [Christian] metaphysic is infused with hopeful mysticism and a [Christ-centered] salvific trajectory.

Whitehead, while spiritual [cf. panpsychic panentheism] is open-ended. The cosmos is not guaranteed a perfect end yet each moment matters as it drives towards a complex web of ongoing co-creation. He gives every entity value [cf. Whitehead's process of axiology = ethics and morality], not because it reaches an endpoint, but because it exists in relation and potential to the cosmos' overall evolutionary design = cosmic teleology [to the God of the universe and the Christ of theology: sic, Process Theology]


SUMMARY THOUGHTS

Teilhard gives us a vision of evolutionary ascent, grounded in unity, love, and divine destiny while Whitehead gives us a framework for valuing each event of becoming as it relates, feels, and contributes to the beauty of the whole.

In many ways both de Chardin and Whitehead have contributed to one another's overall dynamic schema of processual becoming: de Chardin's theology concentrates on a Christian emphasis to Whitehead's more philosophic emphasis that is infused with salvific Christian ideology.

In de Chardin we find a theological emphasis than we do a philosophical structure and in Whitehead we find a mature philosophical rigor from which a mature processual theology can arise which can elevate all global religions from there metaphysics to their axiological outcomes of love and justice.

Consequently, Whitehead's structure then is more pervasive and missional than de Chardin's Christian-only emphasis.


Continue to de Chardin's Cosmic Christ is but a Subset
within Whiteheadian Process Thought, Part 5

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