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| Diagram by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT |
✦ Section 4: God as Companion, Not Judge
From Divine Control to Divine Communion
In classical theology, God is often presented as Judge—sovereign, detached, and morally exacting. This vision finds its roots not only in medieval legal metaphors but also in Greco-Roman political hierarchies where kings ruled by decree and demanded loyalty.
While Scripture contains judicial language, the dominant portrayal of God—especially in Jesus—is not of a distant ruler but of a faithful companion, a suffering servant, and a co-journeyer with creation.
👑 The Problem with the Judge Metaphor
The God-as-Judge image, especially in evangelicalism, has contributed to:
A transactional view of salvation (penal substitution, divine satisfaction)
Fear-based obedience (appease the judge or face wrath)
Fixed moral categories (in-groups vs out-groups, saved vs damned, us vs them)
A static eschatology of eternal reward or punishment
This model often transforms God’s love into conditional approval and makes divine justice synonymous with retribution.
🤝 The Processual Alternative: God as Companion
In process theology, God is not the cosmic lawgiver who stands above creation. God is the empathetic presence within creation—always luring toward healing, wholeness, novelty, and relational fidelity.
“The great companion—the fellow sufferer who understands.” —Whitehead
God is not judging from a throne, but walking in the garden (Genesis 3), wrestling by the river (Genesis 32), weeping by the tomb (John 11), and hanging on the cross (Luke 23).
🔄 Sin and Redemption Reimagined
| Evangelical View | Process View |
|---|---|
| Sin offends God's holiness | Sin disrupts relational harmony |
| Salvation satisfies divine wrath | Salvation restores divine communion |
| Jesus absorbs divine punishment | Jesus reveals divine empathy and resilience |
| Atonement is a legal transaction | Atonement is ongoing at-one-ment through love |
In this view, God’s justice is not punitive, but restorative. Divine wrath is not rage, but the ache of divine love unreceived. Redemption is not a once-for-all decree, but a perpetual process of healing, transforming, and reweaving broken threads into beauty.
🌍 God in a Suffering World
In a world of trauma, oppression, and ecological grief, we need a God who doesn’t just evaluate, but enters into it's pain:
A God who feels the cry of the oppressed, not from afar but from within.
A God who never abandons, even when outcomes break down.
A God whose justice is not violence, but the slow healing of all things.
💬 Voices from the Process Tradition
“God's power is not in overriding freedom but in giving all beings the power to respond to love.” - John Cobb
“The divine is not a spectator. The divine is a participant in the world’s agony.” -Catherine Keller
“God’s wrath is the resistance of love against all that distorts beauty.” - Marjorie Suchocki
✨ God-With-Us
In the classical vision, God controls. In the process vision, God communes.
This is Emmanuel: not God above, but God-with-us—intimately, perpetually, and vulnerably.
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| Chart by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT |
🕊The Companion God
by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT
O God who does not sit above,
but kneels beside a broken world,
who weeps when we are wounded,
and walks with feet dusted by our grief—
be near.
Not as judge in Thy high chambers,
but as friend in our low places.
Not weighing our failings,
but carrying them in love.
You are not the silence of religious law,
but the whisper that says, “Awaken, for I am here.”
You are not the wrath who ends our story,
but the mercy which renews it again.
When we fall, you do not condemn—
you wait,
you ache,
you offer, once again, the thread of becoming.
In the wilderness,
you are the cool wind.
In the fire,
you are the breath that remains.
O' Companion of every exile,
our wounds are known to you—
you rise and call us beauty,
✦ Section 5: The World as Co-Creator with God
From Created Object to Participatory Subject
In classical theism, the world is seen as a finished product: created by divine fiat, sustained by divine will, and awaiting divine judgment. In this jaded model, creation is passive—existing to reflect God's glory or submit to God’s purposes.
But in a processual vision, the world is not a static object. It is a living participant, a field of freedom, feeling, and co-creation. The cosmos is not simply God’s artifact; it is God’s partner.
🌌 The Participatory Cosmos
At the heart of Process Theology is the conviction that reality is relational, down to its most basic levels. Every actual entity has subjective experience—even if faint or minimal. This means:
Rocks and rivers, stars and cells, all carry some interiority.
The cosmos is alive, not in metaphor, but in metaphysical structure.
Consciousness is not an exception—it is the flowering of a deeply panpsychic universe.
“The world lives because it feels. And in feeling, it chooses. And in choosing, it becomes.” —Paraphrase of Whitehead
🧬 Panpsychism and Process
Contrary to materialism, which reduces being to mindless matter, process thought affirms that all entities have some degree of experience. Not all are conscious—but all feel. This is the heartbeat of panpsychism where all things are a consciousness of some kind (referring to Whitehead's idea of "divine lure" and "feeling").
God’s lure toward harmony is offered to each actual occasion. Creation is not manipulated, but invited—at each moment creation is free to respond to divine aim.
The point? The world co-authors its story, moment by moment, with its Creator-God.
✍ Creation as Unfinished Poem
In process thought, the universe is not a complete book—it is a living poem still being written. God writes no line alone. The ink is shared. The rhythm is emergent. The meaning unfolds.
Similarly, humanity is not the center, but the responding (or not responding) voice among many:
- We are poets of becoming, with God, with the world, with each other.
Ecological crisis is not fate; it’s a misuse of creative power.
Justice is not optional; it is the call of inter-dependence.
Beauty is not luxury; it is the very structure of divine becoming.
🌍 The World as God's Body
In this framework, we might say: the world is God’s body, but without straying into pantheistic philosophy, as process philosophy is pan-en-theistic.
Panentheism considers God and the world to be inter-related - with the world being in God and God being in the world. Otherwise stated as "there is a divine element, lure, construction, even DNA, in all creation and created things."
When forests burn, God suffers.
When peace is made, God rejoices.
When life evolves, God grows.
The divine is not beyond creation—it is in, with, and through all creation. As creation transforms, so does God’s experience of it transform with it. This underlines the process idea of a God who evolves with creation processually as versus the classical idea of a God which stands apart-and-above creation, unaffected, impassive, and uncaring.
If a classicist theologian claims otherwise, that their "God is caring," than that classicist should eschew the Greco-Platonic philosophic construction which his or her theology is built upon, deconstruct their impervious ideology, and re-focus on the processual framework to which he or she is claiming otherwise. - re slater
🕊 The Co-Creative Covenant
This vision reframes our role. We are not mere subjects under rule. We are participants in the divine dance. The sacred flows through all life—animal, elemental, quantum, human.
Creation is not complete.God is not complete.
We are not complete.
Together, we become.
🕊Poets of Becoming
A Process Psalm
We are not fixed beings,
nor still water,
We are breath upon breath,
unfolding like dawn.
Creation is not complete -
its rivers write new verses each morning.
Its mountains still rise, beneath
the pressure of time and dreaming.
God is not complete.
Not because God lacks,
but because God loves -
and love always leans forward.
We are not complete.
Our scars still speak.
Our hopes still tremble.
Our hearts still reach - for more than they are.
We are poets of becoming -
with God,
with the world,
with each other.
Each moment is a stanza.
Each breath, a word.
Each act of justice or love,
Together, we become.
Not by finishing - but by flowing.
Not by certainty - but by singing.
So let us write -
not endings - but beginnings,
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| Diagram by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT |
The visual diagram: "The Co-Creative Cosmos," illustrates the ongoing flow between:
God’s Lure → Offering novelty, beauty, and potential.
The World/Cosmos’s Response → Choosing with freedom, feeling, and creative self-expression.
Together, Ongoing Co-Creation, underlines the idea that the future is continually emerging through the co-mutual becoming between the Creator and the created.
The solid arrows show the forward process of divine offer → worldly response → shared outcome.
The dashed arrow shows the feedback loop—how the world’s response shapes future divine lures.
📖 Scriptural Passages Supporting a Co-Creative Worldview
These biblical texts echo the relational, responsive, and participatory nature of divine–world interaction:
🔹 Genesis 2:19
“Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them...”
→ Humanity participates in creation through naming—an act of creative authority.
🔹 Deuteronomy 30:19
“I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life...”
→ God presents a lure—even as the future remains open, dependent on human choice.
🔹 Isaiah 65:17
“See, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered...”
→ God speaks of ongoing creation—not a finished act, but a renewal in progress.
🔹 Jeremiah 18:6
“Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand...”
→ The metaphor affirms both divine shaping and the malleability of history.
🔹 Romans 8:22–23
“The whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth...”
→ The cosmos is not complete but is in the process of transformation with God.
🔹 1 Corinthians 3:9
“For we are co-workers in God’s service; you are God’s field, God’s building.”
→ Divine action includes human and cosmic co-labor.
These verses reflect the processual truth: creation is not static. It is a sacred unfolding.
And we, with God, are part of that divine evolution.
✦ Section 6: The Lure of the Possible
Hope Beyond Certainty, Becoming Beyond Control
In a world shaped by uncertainty, crisis, and collapse, it is tempting to long for certainty. Classical theology often promises this: a fixed divine plan, an unchanging will, and a guaranteed end. This can offer comfort—but it can also become a cage.
This is the power of the lure—God’s gentle, ceaseless invitation to become more than we are, moment by moment.
🌀 What is the Lure?
In Whiteheadian terms, the lure is God’s offer of an initial aim: the best possible outcome in each moment, given the conditions at hand.
This aim is not forced—it is proposed:
It is not command, but invitation.
Not destiny, but possibility.
Not omnipotent will, but divine wooing.
God does not overpower the world with a fixed future. God entices it into its next best becoming.
🔮 Open Future, Real Freedom
In classical systems, the future is often predetermined—either by God’s sovereignty or by prophecy. But in process thought, the future is radically open:
There is no “one way” history must unfold.
God is not outside time pulling strings.
Every choice matters, because every moment co-shapes the cosmos.
Thus: Hope is not the belief in a guaranteed outcome.
Hope is the trust that God is always offering a new way forward.
🌱 Transformation is Always Possible
The lure means that no situation is final. Even tragedy, loss, or injustice is not the last word. God continuously seeks to draw new meaning, new connection, new beauty from what exists.
This makes divine redemption not a single event, but a continuous, cosmic rhythm:
| Event-Based Redemption | Processual Redemption |
|---|---|
| Past-focused (cross, atonement) | Ever-present becoming |
| Legal transaction | Relational transformation |
| Once-and-for-all | Ongoing and responsive |
| Applied to individuals | Participatory and cosmic |
| Rooted in sin removal | Rooted in value, love, novelty |
💬 Voices of the Possible
“Each moment offers a fresh lure—no matter the past, no matter the pain.”
- John Cobb
“God does not erase chaos. God works with it—coaxes form from the fragments.”
- Catherine Keller
“The future is not a fixed plan—it is a divine question whispered to the soul: ‘What beauty can be born here?’”
- Process Theologian, Anonymous
✨ Becoming is the New Faith
Faith in process theology is not allegiance to propositions.
It is not belief in a distant intervention.
Faith is trust in the lure.
Faith is trust in God’s companionship in becoming.
Faith is courage to respond to the next call toward goodness.
This is the ethics of the possible: an unfolding trust that we are never alone, and that we are always invited to become more whole, more free, more loving.
by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT
O God of quiet whisper,
you do not thunder down decrees—
you lean close with invitation.
You do not bind me to a single path,
but unfold roads as I walk them.
You are the nudge, the breath,
the shimmer of a better becoming
that I can almost imagine.
You lure me toward a joy not yet born,
toward mercy still in seed,
toward a future made real only if I dare.
May I trust not in guarantees,
but in your nearness.
May I believe not in destiny,
but in the dance of our co-creation.
Let my “yes” meet your calling
in this, and every, holy moment.
Amen.
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