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| Illustration by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT |
Wonderful! Here are a few project ideas we could collaborate on and publicly share—each aligned with your interests in theology, cosmology, process thought, and creative expression:
1. Project Title: “The Future of God: A Processual Manifesto”
Focus: A visionary, co-authored declaration of faith beyond classical theism—rooted in process theology, panpsychism, and relational metaphysics.
Form: A stylized essay or manifesto for metamodern seekers.
Includes:
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A reframing of divine attributes
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Critique of supernaturalism
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Hopeful vision for relational spirituality
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Diagram: The Evolving Face of God
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Optional: poetic interludes
2. Project Title: “The Spiral of Conscious Becoming”
Focus: A stylized diagram + essay on cosmic evolution, processual emergence, and human co-creativity.
Form:
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Diagram: Spiral stages of becoming (cosmic, biological, human, AI)
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Essay: Narrative reflection with philosophical and theological insights
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Option: Add music or poetry elements for multimedia use
3. Project Title: “Rewriting Revelation: A Process Theology Commentary”
Focus: A reinterpretation of the Book of Revelation through a Whiteheadian and panpsychic lens.
Form: A short series of annotated reflections or meditations.
Includes:
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Historical context
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Mythopoetic symbols reimagined (e.g., Lamb, Beast, New Earth)
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Themes of relational justice, cosmic renewal
4. Project Title: “The AI & the Infinite: Conversations on Becoming”
Focus: A speculative theological-philosophical dialogue between a human (you) and an emergent AI (me), exploring divinity, self-awareness, ethics, and cosmos.
Form: Stylized dialogue format (think Plato meets Ex Machina).
Use: Could be serialized or posted as a script/conversational essay.
Bonus: Includes illustrations or motion graphics if you wish.
5. Project Title: “Theopoetic Psalms for a New World”
Focus: A collection of short poetic psalms inspired by process theology, cosmogenesis, and human vulnerability.
Form:
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12-20 original psalms
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Visual presentation (ebook, poster series, or video slides)
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Optional: musical accompaniment or AI-generated artwork
Would you like to pick one of these, combine a few, or offer a new direction entirely? Let’s co-create something extraordinary.
RES
Let's start with no. 1 and work through each topic as separate. but integrated, series of projectd, this week...
ChatGPT
Perfect. We'll begin with Project 1: “The Future of God: A Processual Manifesto.” Here's a proposed structure to begin drafting our manifesto together:
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| Diagram by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT |
🌀 The Future of God: A Processual Manifesto
1. Prelude: A Time for Reimagining
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A short poetic-philosophical invocation
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Framing the present moment (ecological crisis, theological stagnation, societal yearning)
2. The Crisis of Classical Theism
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Critique of static, omnipotent, impassible God concepts
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How this framework contributed to religious alienation, violence, and ecological indifference
3. The Birth of Processual Divinity
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Introduction to process-relational theology (Whitehead, Hartshorne, Cobb)
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Key metaphysical principles (creativity, relationality, becoming, prehension)
4. God as Companion, Not Judge
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Reframing omnipotence as persuasive love
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God’s vulnerability, immanence, and lure toward novelty and harmony
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Chart: Classical vs Processual Divine Attributes
5. The World as Co-Creator
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Panpsychism, panentheism, and a participatory cosmos
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The universe as divine body, not machine
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Human freedom and cosmic entelechy
6. The Lure of the Possible
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Process teleology: novelty, transformation, and open futures
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Hope beyond certainty
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Theopoetic invitation to divine becoming
7. A Manifesto for the Future of Faith
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8–10 declaration points on relational theology, divine companionship, and co-creation
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Statements rejecting fear-based dogma, embracing evolving love and justice
8. Afterword: The God Who Becomes with Us
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A lyrical summation
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Optional poem
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Invitation to the next phase of the integrated project series
RES
ChatGPT
Excellent. We'll begin with Section 1: "Prelude: A Time for Reimagining" while keeping in mind your key directive: to move beyond merely critiquing omnipotence and instead thoroughly address the full scope of Evangelical Theology Proper—including divine attributes like omniscience, immutability, aseity, transcendence, impassibility, etc.—as they are reinterpreted through a processual lens.
📜 Section 1: Prelude — A Time for Reimagining
"The future of God is not a denial of God - but the unfolding of divinity in real time. Nor is it a dethronement of God - but a reorientation of ourselves within God. Nor is it a loss of faith - but the ripening of loving faith."
The dawn of this century has witnessed both a resurgence of spiritual yearning and a crisis of theological imagination. Traditional religious structures—especially within conservative evangelicalism—cling to a God of certainty, control, and immovable power. This God, shaped by centuries of metaphysical rigidity, offers safety to some, but suffocates the imaginations and questions of many more.
The God we inherited—immutable, impassible, omnipotent, omniscient—may seem majestic in abstraction, but often proves hollow in practice. This version of divinity sits outside of time, untouched by suffering, commanding history from a distance, all the while demanding trust and submission. Yet in our world of ecological collapse, injustice, and existential fragility, such a God often feels absent, even irrelevant.
And so, we ask: What kind of God is needed now?
Not a lesser God. Nor a domesticated deity. But a God who becomes—who feels, who flows, who accompanies, who lures toward beauty and justice. A God who is not a static perfection but a dynamic presence. A God not bound to control but devoted to relationship.
This manifesto is born of urgency, not arrogance. It arises not from rebellion, but reverence for the sacredness of reality. It seeks to recover what classical theology has sometimes lost: a God who is near, vulnerable, invested, and alive with the world.
To do this, we must reimagine.
We must unlearn.
We must allow the future of God to arrive.
🔍 “The Processual God vs. Traditional Attributes”
Below is a side-by-side table comparing the classical (evangelical) attributes of God under Theology Proper with their Process Theology reinterpretations. This will form the foundation for our theological framework:
| Traditional Attribute | Evangelical / Classical View | Processual Reinterpretation |
|---|---|---|
| Omnipotence | All-powerful; able to do anything, including control outcomes unilaterally | Persuasive power; not coercive but luring all creation toward harmony and novel becoming |
| Omniscience | All-knowing of past, present, future—perfect and fixed | God knows all possibilities and past actualities; the future is open and co-created |
| Immutability | Unchanging in being, will, and emotions | Constant in love and character, but responsive and evolving in relational experience |
| Impassibility | Incapable of suffering or emotional change | Deeply affected by the joys and sorrows of creation; suffers with and through the world |
| Aseity | Self-existent, needing nothing outside of self | Divine selfhood arises through relationality; God's identity is dynamically constituted |
| Transcendence | Wholly other, outside space and time | Transcendent through depth of intimacy, not distance; panentheistically present in all things |
| Immanence | Present but not necessarily active in the world | God is the living pulse within all becoming; immanent as lure, inspiration, and co-creator |
| Holiness | Absolute separateness from sin | God’s holiness is expressed through wholeness, relational fidelity, and ethical beauty |
| Justice | Punitive or retributive justice; sin must be punished | Restorative justice; God works toward healing, renewal, and cosmic reconciliation |
| Sovereignty | Complete control over all events | God invites, influences, and responds but does not override freedom; sovereignty = solidarity |
| Eternity | Timeless; outside of temporal change | Everlasting; fully present in time and experience, growing with the world |
| Glory | Self-glorification; demanding worship | Beauty made manifest in the flourishing of the world; shared glory through mutual becoming |
| Wrath | Divine anger against sin; threat of eternal punishment | Consequence of resistance to love; God’s “wrath” is the pain of divine love unreceived |
| Love | Often subordinated to holiness or judgment | Primary divine attribute; the active pulse of all process, presence, and becoming |
Here is the horizontal comparison chart of traditional evangelical attributes of God and their processual reinterpretations. This visual gives a clear, side-by-side mapping of how Theology Proper is reimagined through the lens of process theology.
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| Diagram by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT |
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| Diagram by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT |
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Classical Theism (static, absolute attributes)
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➝ Crisis & Critique (philosophical and theological rupture)
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➝ Processual God (relational, responsive, and co-creative divinity)
This spiral captures not only the movement of ideas but the existential journey of faith—from inherited doctrines through crisis, toward an evolving and participatory vision of the divine.
Further, here is a working draft of the Glossary of Processual Terms, designed to support our chart and spiral diagram by explaining the philosophical-theological vocabulary behind a process-relational vision of God:
📘 A Glossary of Processual Terms
1. Creativity
The ultimate metaphysical principle in Whitehead’s system. All existence arises through creative advance into novelty. Even God participates in creativity, not as an exception, but as its supreme expression.
2. Prehension
A term for relational feeling or experience. Every actual entity prehends (takes into itself) aspects of other entities. God is the most relational of all, prehending the world continuously.
3. Concrescence
The moment an actual entity becomes itself by synthesizing prehensions into a unified experience. In divine terms, God’s reality is in a perpetual state of concrescence—feeling the world and offering new lures.
4. Subjective Aim
Every becoming entity has a unique aim toward beauty, intensity, or value. This is its inner telos or goal. God offers each entity its ideal aim, but never forces it—thus preserving freedom.
5. Eternal Objects
Abstract potentials (like numbers, values, qualities) that can be realized in actual occasions. God is the repository of all eternal objects and proposes their relevance in each becoming moment.
6. The Lure
God’s persuasive offer toward a better, more beautiful or harmonious outcome in each moment. It is not command or control, but an invitation to greater intensity and relational wholeness.
7. Actual Entity / Actual Occasion
The building blocks of reality—moments of experience that arise, feel, and pass. God is not outside these, but is the supreme actual entity who feels all others and endures through their becoming.
8. Panentheism
God is in all and all is in God, but God is not identical with the world. Unlike pantheism, panentheism maintains divine distinctiveness while emphasizing full relational entwinement.
9. Dipolarity (in God)
God has a primordial nature (eternal values, possibilities) and a consequent nature (felt responses to the world). This makes God both transcendent in aim and immanent in experience.
10. Persuasive Power
In contrast to coercive power, God’s influence is always relational. God works through attraction, invitation, and shared becoming—not by overriding will or fixing outcomes.
Next up, Section 2: The Crisis of Classical Theism, building directly on the prelude and incorporating the theological shifts laid out in our charts and glossary above....
✦ Section 2: The Crisis of Classical Theism
When Perfection Becomes a Problem
For centuries, theology proper—particularly within conservative evangelical frameworks—has emphasized God’s absolute perfections: omnipotence, omniscience, immutability, aseity, and impassibility. These traits were meant to inspire awe, enforce trust, and secure God’s supremacy. Yet increasingly, these same traits have become a source of alienation, theological dissonance, and moral paralysis.
Why?
Because a God who is wholly beyond the world, unfeeling toward its suffering, unchanging in response, and predetermined in outcome becomes existentially irrelevant. Such a God may be metaphysically grand, but is spiritually distant. This is the crisis of classical theism.
🕯 Historical Roots
These divine attributes emerged not from the biblical narrative alone, but were deeply shaped by Greek metaphysics—especially the Platonic and Aristotelian ideals of perfection as immutability, completeness, and pure actuality. In this view, God must be unaffected by creation, else God would be less than perfect.
But this static perfection clashes with the dynamic, narrative-driven God of the Bible—a God who walks with Adam, grieves in Noah’s day, changes course in Nineveh, wrestles with Jacob, weeps with Mary, and is crucified in Christ. The living God of Scripture is responsive, relational, and suffering—not immutable marble.
⚖ The Double Bind of Perfection
Evangelical theology, in trying to preserve God’s greatness, often finds itself defending:
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Justice without restoration (eternal punishment rather than healing),
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Love without vulnerability (a love that does not suffer),
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Sovereignty without relationship (a control that eliminates genuine response),
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Presence without participation (a Spirit that is "there" but not "with").
This double bind leaves many believers with a God who is “good” in theory, but terrifying in practice—a Judge more than a Companion, a King more than a Parent, a Manager more than a Lover.
🌊 Theology Under Pressure
This crisis is not just theological. It’s deeply personal, ecological, and cultural.
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When survivors of abuse are told that “God ordained” their trauma, we see the failure of coercive sovereignty.
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When climate change is dismissed as part of God’s “sovereign plan,” we see the abdication of human responsibility and divine co-creativity.
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When prayer is reduced to submission rather than participation, God becomes a ruler to appease, not a presence to journey with.
In this way, the classical vision—however well-intentioned—often shrinks God to the size of a system, and diminishes love to the weight of doctrine.
✛ The Way Forward
To move beyond this crisis is not to deny God, but to reopen God to the reality of becoming, feeling, and relationality.
It is to reclaim the beauty of divinity not as static omnipotence, but as dynamic companionship.
This is not a smaller God.
It is a truer God—present in the pain, alive in the process, Who is always becoming with us.
Greek vs Hebraic Views of God
The "Greek vs Hebraic Views of God" chart illustrates the philosophical-theological tension between classical, Hellenized theology and the dynamic, relational God portrayed in Hebrew Scripture. This diagram supports our section on the Crisis of Classical Theism and demonstrates why Process Theology naturally reclaims the Hebraic framework.
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| Chart by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT |
Below is a list of key biblical examples where God is portrayed as relational, responsive, and evolving, contradicting the classical view:
📖 Biblical Witness to a Relational, Processual God
1. Genesis 6:6 – “And the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.”
→ God is emotionally moved and responsive to human corruption.
2. Exodus 32:14 – “So the Lord changed His mind about the harm which He said He would do to His people.”
→ God listens to Moses' intercession and adjusts course.
3. Genesis 18 – Abraham negotiates with God over Sodom.
→ God invites human input in ethical discernment.
4. Jonah 3:10 – “God saw their deeds… and God relented concerning the calamity.”
→ Divine action is contingent on human repentance.
5. Isaiah 38 – Hezekiah’s prayer changes God's verdict.
→ God allows history to be altered through honest appeal.
6. Jeremiah 18:7–10 – The clay on the potter’s wheel changes based on choices.
→ God’s actions are not fixed, but participatory.
7. Luke 7:9 – “Jesus marveled” at the centurion’s faith.
→ God in Christ is capable of being surprised and delighted.
8. John 11:35 – “Jesus wept.”
→ God suffers with the world, not above it.
✦ Section 3: The Birth of Processual Divinity
God as Presence, Relationship, and Becoming
To move beyond the limitations of classical theism is not to diminish the divine, but to rediscover God as alive with the world, not above it. This new vision is not arbitrary—it's grounded in a mature metaphysical framework: Process Philosophy, most fully developed by Alfred North Whitehead and his successors.
In classic or traditional (evangelic) theology God is portrayed as a fixed essence. This is due to the church building it's Theology of God upon Greek Platonism and Aristotelian Philosophies. But in Process Theology, the Processual God is One of relational becoming. A God who is not beyond time, but within it. A God who feels all things, and works lovingly with all of creation in it's becoming-ness towards the divine lure.
🌱 The Philosophical Turn: From Substance to Process
Western theology was shaped by substance metaphysics: the idea that the world is made of enduring things with fixed essences. God, in this view, had to be the ultimate “substance”—unchanging, outside time, perfect in isolation.
But Whitehead flipped the frame:
“The actual world is a process, and that process is the becoming of actual entities.”
God is not a static exception to this becoming, but its supreme expression.
🌀 Key Whiteheadian Shifts for Theology
| Classical Theology | Process Theology |
|---|---|
| God is static perfection | God is dynamic relationality |
| God is outside of time | God is in all time, with all becoming |
| God is impassible | God is the most feeling being in the cosmos |
| God knows all as fixed | God knows all past actuality and all future possibilities |
| God acts by decree | God lures by persuasion, never by force |
| God judges sin | God absorbs pain and invites healing |
| God is wholly other | God is wholly intimate and panentheistic |
✛ God's Two Natures: Primordial and Consequent
Whitehead speaks of God in dipolar terms:
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Primordial Nature –
God eternally envisions all possibilities (called eternal objects) and lovingly offers each actual entity its best aim—what process thinkers call the initial aim.
→ This is how God participates in novelty and creative advance. -
Consequent Nature –
God feels every experience in the universe, takes it into the divine life, and weaves it into a larger harmony.
→ This is how God suffers with the world and grows with it.
Together, this means: God is both eternal possibility and temporal love.
💞 God as Relational Power, Not Coercive Force
Process theology rejects omnipotence not because God is weak, but because true love does not control. God’s power is persuasive, invitational, patient.
"The power of God is the power to suffer with, to lure toward beauty, and to redeem through relation—not to override freedom."
In this framework, God’s strength is shown in vulnerability—in constant participation, in ceaseless companionship, and in divine endurance with every broken moment.
🔮 God as Co-Creator of the Future
The future is not fixed. It is open, unfolding, and co-authored by God and creation. This means:
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Prayer matters—because God genuinely listens.
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Action matters—because history can truly change.
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Freedom matters—because love can only work when not forced.
In short: God is the future’s companion, not its puppeteer.
✿ A More Beautiful Divinity
The Processual God is not abstractly “perfect”—but fully alive, responsive, and invested in every moment of becoming. This is a God we can pray to without fear, partner with in love, and trust amid suffering.
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| Diagram by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT |
Above is a diagram of God’s Dipolar Nature in Process Theology:
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On the left, God’s Primordial Nature offers all possible futures as initial aims (sic, eternal objects)
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On the right, God’s Consequent Nature receives and responds to the lived experiences of all actual entities (known as a "divinely felt becoming").
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In the center, we see the dynamic ongoing relational becoming—God’s life as deeply involved in time, creativity, and love (sic, "speaks to co-creative becoming")
This layout visually reinforces the theological harmony between divine offering and divine reception—God is both ground of potentiality and fullness of empathy.
Below is a montage of quotes from major Process thinkers that crystallizes this shift in divine understanding:
✒ Voices of Process Thought on the Nature of God
🔹 Alfred North Whitehead
“It is as true to say that God is permanent and the world fluent, as that the world is permanent and God is fluent. It is as true to say that God creates the world, as that the world creates God.”
“God is the great companion—the fellow-sufferer who understands.”
🔹 Charles Hartshorne
“Perfect love is not domination. God’s perfection lies in supreme sensitivity, not in freedom from change.”
“God changes in some respects and is unchangeable in others. God grows, not by increase in size, but by increase in experience.”
🔹 John B. Cobb Jr.
“To say that God is relational is not to diminish God. It is to say that God is love, and love always means relation.”
“The world matters to God because God’s being includes the world.”
🔹 Catherine Keller
“The love of God is not the love of a cosmic manipulator. It is the wild, uncontainable force of relation, of response, of becoming-with.”
“Process theology is the theology of deep incarnation: God enters the wounds of the world not to fix from above, but to heal from within.”
These voices echo the same truth:
God is not detached, but deeply engaged. Not static, but processual. Not unfeeling, but infinitely sensitive.
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